I've been wondering if there's any way of creating a webserver that works like BitTorrent - when you download files, you share your home bandwidth to help deliver the cached pages.
It would largely rely on trust with people not deleting the content, but it would be better than nothing.
There is no god damn place for proprietary software because making software "for profit" as opposed to actually making it functional is not making software.
I would disagree with that, except in a few examples.
I can think of a lot of excellent commercial software products like WinZip, Ahead Nero and tons of components I've bought which are well worth buying.
The difference with the open source communities is numbers, and that they can catch up very fast (and go past) the commercial alternatives.
Also, commercial software houses are probably struggling for money because they've run out of original features and reached maturity. This cripples paid development unless support or enhancement work (like with small software companies) is involved.. We still use Office 97 at work, because it does all we need a word processor to do.
I think Microsoft are pretty scared about the idea of decoupling servers and clients - if someone can build a system and have people from all sorts of machines using it, they may choose someone else.
It can also spell difficulties for then in terms of upgrades. If a company has thousands of people using a browser to talk to a server based system, the load on that machine is less important than the server load - and maybe people won't upgrade (and buy new licenses).
Unlike old 'terminals', you can deliver nice screens through a browser with drop downs, colours, images etc. There's no issues about software versions and no hacking of the software to install because no software is delivered to the desktop. For many business applications, using a browser is much more sensible than delivering desktop apps.
Also, consider things like Route planners. I don't use Autoroute any more because I don't use a planner enough to warrant installing the software, and I can reach a whole bunch of online ones that are constantly updated for me.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's next big push is to try and get ASP.NET and Internet explorer very heavily bound together so that the pages delivered by ASP.NET deliver "Microsoft Enhanced" pages which contain secret binary code by default.
I once heard someone from Delta Airlines explain that their aim was to get rid of the competition.
Of course it is, but in all commerce, consumers demand better, and this drives new competitors. Airlines are a good example - think of Pan Am, TWA and the trouble that BA are in at the moment.
Sadly, Microsoft don't just ship the airlines, they own the airports, traffic control and the skies as well. A righteous government would have split them into "applications", "development tools" and "operating systems" years ago.
The importance of this: their customers might be thieves, but by suing them, they risk losing them as customers...
Yes, and what they produce is an item which is a very high margin product. Better to have 100 people hear an album and 1 buy it than 10 people hear it and none buy it.
They seem to see it as: Radio station/TV promotion good, internet file trading bad. But both are forms of promotion.
As a kid, I could have taped a friends LP and listened to that, but I had the disposable income and would rather own the actual record. Not because of improved quality, but because I wanted the real thing (and it was a cooler thing to do). The record industry have made file-trading a Robin Hood activity - probably now cooler to the youth than buying a record.
They showed some obfuscated code as being "infringed" code, which was GPL code. How do we know that someone hasn't used some kind of code compare and found 80 lines where someone at SCO had removed the GPL license so it didn't appear on the compare.
And even if it is 80 lines, that's the kind of level of code that appears on websites advising how to hook VB up to Outlook or something. If I caught someone using 80 lines of my code, I'd suggest buy me a crate of champagne as pennance.
Really, kids should be kept away from computers unless they are working with the fundamentals.
The pervading attitude is akin to "teach kids about car maintenance by getting them to clean the bodywork".
Kids should be taught how the things work (not down to fetch/execute cycle level) in terms of hard drives, networks, and maybe some simple programming (but not anything which makes it too easy).
My neighbour is giving up an IT module of her schooling. One reason was because you had to build a website using Frontpage, and she didn't have Frontpage.
Like what the hey? That's not teaching people about IT, it's teaching them about site design. There's nothing about IT in that - you may as well get someone to write a book on a word processor and count that as IT.
Kids are better off with simpler computers for learning anyway. Machines like the C64, ZX Spectrum and Ataris had such basic functionality, that you had to do most of the work yourself, and thereby learn the fundamentals. Like web design - people should learn HTML/CSS before using a tool that makes it quicker.
So, I could watch a concert or opera, and maybe pause it and read up on a particular section, or get notes that way.
When I go out, it's different. I may sit at home and follow the libretto of an opera to understand it better, but I do that so I can enjoy it without watching the subtitle screen when I go out.
Why not just let people have gorgeous programs like the ones I get from the Welsh National Opera which I have a nice collection of, are well bound and I can flick through.
All this stuff is just technology for technology's sake. Next thing someone will suggest providing an RSS feed of the scores.
I go to concerts and operas to get away from this.
I see Opera occassionally, and they have a surtitle (above) screen above the stage.
Personally, I still swat up beforehand, and don't need to bother too much with tragedies, but for comedies it's good. And much better than awful translations.
There's nothing wrong with the screw-cap as a stopper for wine. People have tested wines stored with a screw-cap against those stored using a cork, and the screw-cap mostly wins out because you don't get the fungus that causes wine to be 'corked'. It is thought that wines which are 'laid down' for 10+years may gain from the effect of the cork which screw caps will not imbue.
The only reason why screw-cap wine is generally worse is that people don't put good wine in it as a rule (although this is changing).
How does Steve Jobs get to the top of that list? For giving us iTunes and that neat little media player?
I don't honestly think that he even deserves a top 50 place. Sure, he was influential in the past, but if you are talking about now...let's just say that people running Anti-RIAA sites are probably more influential.
Ellison deserves to be top 5.
Stallman and Raymond should be in the 50.
Darl McBride (for all the wrong reasons) should be in the 50.
Reason: because I know that what I learn with PHP will probably grow and mature, build on what I already know and that we'll have people around with 15-20 years PHP experience eventually.
In the timeframe of MS products, no-one it seems gets sufficiently proficient that they can do it without referring to manuals for details of classes etc.
.NET will definitely disappear. It has to for Microsoft to survive.
ISTM that many computer companies have a number of sources of income. IBM have consultancy, Sun and Apple have hardware.
Microsoft only has software. Microsoft could have taken the approach with VB of releasing VB7, and included a bunch of the missing stuff like image classes, mail classes, XML classes, and that would have kept most developers up to date and happy.
The trouble is that eventually, people will baulk at paying considerable prices for effectively a point upgrade of a mature product (I think they're suffering this with Office).
So, you come up with "Silver bullet for all your problems" and give it a whole new name. Shift the paradigms around, and get people relearning and repurchasing Visual Studio, and get another 4-5 upgrade sales. Personally, I think it's a good language, but I don't think it helps me any more than VB with some extra features.
The cost of most companies upgrading to.NET is IMO much higher than living with the pains of VB6. It's partly about the cost of learning the language, but it's also about getting a bit "jedi" with the language, where you can code it with your eyes shut. That last part takes a few years.
Any company thinking of investing in.NET should think again. I reckon in 5-7 years time there will be something new, and your software investment will be worthless. Some companies I know are still using COBOL subroutines they wrote 15 years ago - they work. In 15 years time, will you be able to say this about using MS software (except unmanaged C++).
Better to go with something open source or standard, where upgrades are largely down to genuine need of requirements rather than commercial need.
I've lived without buying a CD for over 6 months now. My boycott of the RIAA has been going good, particularly as I feel more and more that CDs are a ripoff compared to DVDs.
"In 20 years time, I expect to see a couple of guys in a garage doing effects that good."
I agree, and hope that we are at the end point of people hyping on CGI. The other film that to me marked a watershed was Minority Report, where a few things were obviously CGI, but others where my brain had assumed they'd built a set/used braver stuntment, but I learnt from the extras that they'd used CGI.
Too many films in the mid-late 90s were successful because of "wow" CGI (like Independence Day). Maybe people will have to start telling stories again, and using effects to support the stories.
Slashdot Mirror
It would largely rely on trust with people not deleting the content, but it would be better than nothing.
I would disagree with that, except in a few examples.
I can think of a lot of excellent commercial software products like WinZip, Ahead Nero and tons of components I've bought which are well worth buying.
The difference with the open source communities is numbers, and that they can catch up very fast (and go past) the commercial alternatives.
Also, commercial software houses are probably struggling for money because they've run out of original features and reached maturity. This cripples paid development unless support or enhancement work (like with small software companies) is involved.. We still use Office 97 at work, because it does all we need a word processor to do.
It can also spell difficulties for then in terms of upgrades. If a company has thousands of people using a browser to talk to a server based system, the load on that machine is less important than the server load - and maybe people won't upgrade (and buy new licenses).
Unlike old 'terminals', you can deliver nice screens through a browser with drop downs, colours, images etc. There's no issues about software versions and no hacking of the software to install because no software is delivered to the desktop. For many business applications, using a browser is much more sensible than delivering desktop apps.
Also, consider things like Route planners. I don't use Autoroute any more because I don't use a planner enough to warrant installing the software, and I can reach a whole bunch of online ones that are constantly updated for me.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's next big push is to try and get ASP.NET and Internet explorer very heavily bound together so that the pages delivered by ASP.NET deliver "Microsoft Enhanced" pages which contain secret binary code by default.
And when using it, it's not slow. How much time have I saved not closing wretched popup windows alone?
Of course it is, but in all commerce, consumers demand better, and this drives new competitors. Airlines are a good example - think of Pan Am, TWA and the trouble that BA are in at the moment.
Sadly, Microsoft don't just ship the airlines, they own the airports, traffic control and the skies as well. A righteous government would have split them into "applications", "development tools" and "operating systems" years ago.
And yet, at the same time, they claim that swapping music is killing the industry.
And even after a few years of swapping, there's still plenty of coke being consumed by musicians.
This is why the people don't view swapping music as a moral crime... because they figure that these people are not suffering from what they do.
Yes, and what they produce is an item which is a very high margin product. Better to have 100 people hear an album and 1 buy it than 10 people hear it and none buy it.
They seem to see it as: Radio station/TV promotion good, internet file trading bad. But both are forms of promotion.
As a kid, I could have taped a friends LP and listened to that, but I had the disposable income and would rather own the actual record. Not because of improved quality, but because I wanted the real thing (and it was a cooler thing to do). The record industry have made file-trading a Robin Hood activity - probably now cooler to the youth than buying a record.
And to our American readers, dates should be written as dd/mm/yyyy.
They showed some obfuscated code as being "infringed" code, which was GPL code. How do we know that someone hasn't used some kind of code compare and found 80 lines where someone at SCO had removed the GPL license so it didn't appear on the compare.
And even if it is 80 lines, that's the kind of level of code that appears on websites advising how to hook VB up to Outlook or something. If I caught someone using 80 lines of my code, I'd suggest buy me a crate of champagne as pennance.
I'll back up this comment. IMO it's better than WSFTP.
The pervading attitude is akin to "teach kids about car maintenance by getting them to clean the bodywork".
Kids should be taught how the things work (not down to fetch/execute cycle level) in terms of hard drives, networks, and maybe some simple programming (but not anything which makes it too easy).
My neighbour is giving up an IT module of her schooling. One reason was because you had to build a website using Frontpage, and she didn't have Frontpage.
Like what the hey? That's not teaching people about IT, it's teaching them about site design. There's nothing about IT in that - you may as well get someone to write a book on a word processor and count that as IT.
Kids are better off with simpler computers for learning anyway. Machines like the C64, ZX Spectrum and Ataris had such basic functionality, that you had to do most of the work yourself, and thereby learn the fundamentals. Like web design - people should learn HTML/CSS before using a tool that makes it quicker.
So, I could watch a concert or opera, and maybe pause it and read up on a particular section, or get notes that way.
When I go out, it's different. I may sit at home and follow the libretto of an opera to understand it better, but I do that so I can enjoy it without watching the subtitle screen when I go out.
All this stuff is just technology for technology's sake. Next thing someone will suggest providing an RSS feed of the scores.
I go to concerts and operas to get away from this.
Personally, I still swat up beforehand, and don't need to bother too much with tragedies, but for comedies it's good. And much better than awful translations.
It's just there's a belief by some that Guinness in Ireland is a real, live beer, when it is keg like the rest of the world.
The only reason why screw-cap wine is generally worse is that people don't put good wine in it as a rule (although this is changing).
The Guinness in Ireland is just like any other.
I don't honestly think that he even deserves a top 50 place. Sure, he was influential in the past, but if you are talking about now...let's just say that people running Anti-RIAA sites are probably more influential.
Ellison deserves to be top 5.
Stallman and Raymond should be in the 50.
Darl McBride (for all the wrong reasons) should be in the 50.
Reason: because I know that what I learn with PHP will probably grow and mature, build on what I already know and that we'll have people around with 15-20 years PHP experience eventually.
In the timeframe of MS products, no-one it seems gets sufficiently proficient that they can do it without referring to manuals for details of classes etc.
ISTM that many computer companies have a number of sources of income. IBM have consultancy, Sun and Apple have hardware.
Microsoft only has software. Microsoft could have taken the approach with VB of releasing VB7, and included a bunch of the missing stuff like image classes, mail classes, XML classes, and that would have kept most developers up to date and happy.
The trouble is that eventually, people will baulk at paying considerable prices for effectively a point upgrade of a mature product (I think they're suffering this with Office).
So, you come up with "Silver bullet for all your problems" and give it a whole new name. Shift the paradigms around, and get people relearning and repurchasing Visual Studio, and get another 4-5 upgrade sales. Personally, I think it's a good language, but I don't think it helps me any more than VB with some extra features.
The cost of most companies upgrading to .NET is IMO much higher than living with the pains of VB6. It's partly about the cost of learning the language, but it's also about getting a bit "jedi" with the language, where you can code it with your eyes shut. That last part takes a few years.
Any company thinking of investing in .NET should think again. I reckon in 5-7 years time there will be something new, and your software investment will be worthless. Some companies I know are still using COBOL subroutines they wrote 15 years ago - they work. In 15 years time, will you be able to say this about using MS software (except unmanaged C++).
Better to go with something open source or standard, where upgrades are largely down to genuine need of requirements rather than commercial need.
I've lived without buying a CD for over 6 months now. My boycott of the RIAA has been going good, particularly as I feel more and more that CDs are a ripoff compared to DVDs.
No audio CD should be installing *ANYTHING* on my PC, unless I'm aware of it at first.
I agree, and hope that we are at the end point of people hyping on CGI. The other film that to me marked a watershed was Minority Report, where a few things were obviously CGI, but others where my brain had assumed they'd built a set/used braver stuntment, but I learnt from the extras that they'd used CGI.
Too many films in the mid-late 90s were successful because of "wow" CGI (like Independence Day). Maybe people will have to start telling stories again, and using effects to support the stories.
And who isn't?
Actually, I imagine they're really missing the glory days of people who were upgrading from vinyl.